


With Tremulous Cadence

by SullenSiren (lorax)



Category: Mirrormask (2005)
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, Yuletide 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-08 14:01:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/SullenSiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helena and Un-Valentine practice juggling as they talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Tremulous Cadence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fahye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/gifts).



> Written for the [yuletide](http://community.livejournal.com/yuletide/profile) challenge. I drew [Fahye](http://fahye.livejournal.com), who had two prompts I could do . . . and I couldn't pick, and did them both. For Mirrormask she wasn't specific, but I hope this works for you! I did some digging on your LJ.

**With Tremulous Cadence **

  
_"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.  
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."  
\-- Oscar Wilde_

"You'll need a mask," she tells him, and she feels the smirk lurking around the corners of her mouth, trying to escape the careful blankness of her face. She tosses the pin towards him, beginning the game.

He catches it, his smile confused as the pins began to pass between them. "I know," he answers. It's the not the first time she's said it. It's not the hundredth time she'd smiled that smile that she knows he can't understand. When she laughs, he speeds their tosses, silent reprimand for the smile he doesn't really mind.

She doesn't falter, hands moving, catching and releasing to the rhythmic cadence. "What will you be when you put it on, then?" She steps to the side, and he shifts the opposite way, a slow, pacing circling of one another, pins and words flying between them.

"Well. I'll be me in a mask, I expect," he answers wryly. His name is Kevin, but she calls him Valentine, sometimes. He's never asked why. He just took the name as if somehow he'd known it was his.

"A man is never more himself than when he wears a mask," she tells him. "Someone famous and smart said that."

"I'm sure they did. Wise man, whoever he was," he answers, chancing a glance away from the pins and at her face.

"It might have been a woman," she points out, feeling the smile lurking again.

"It might have been. But it wasn't. If it was a woman, you'd remember her," he counters.

It doesn't make sense, but she knows what he means, somehow. Women weren't quoted often before the last century, and it's easier to remember people closer to her own lifetime. "So, my point stands," he continues, sidestepping until he stands where she had a moment before, and her feet find his footprints. "My mum said that clothes don't make the man. Of course, she said it because she didn't want to buy me shoes that cost more than our house, but she was right, nonetheless. True of masks, too."

"Did she buy you from a man?" she asks, tossing her pins up high, a flying circle of objects contained unto herself, separate from him.

"You're a strange sort of girl, Helena. And quit showing off, or I'll shove off entirely and you can practice alone," he tells her. They both know he won't, but it goes unsaid. His eyes are laughing, though he pulls the corners of his mouth down in a frown she knows he doesn't feel.

She deals the pins back out like prizes, squinting her eyes so that his face becomes just a square shape framing a scowling mouth and bright blue eyes. Her stomach warms with a rush of something soft and sweet that neither of them is ready to acknowledge. She bends quickly, adds a pin, changes their cadence. "If I were a lost Princess, what would you be, Valentine?"

He adjusts, fumbling a moment before he rights their little world of dancing pins. "Kevin," he corrects, though he doesn't mind the name, and she can tell. "And that's just silly, Helena. How would one lose something so important as a Princess? And since I'm looking right at you, how could you be lost?"

"Princesses get lost. Look at Anastasia. And I could be lost to someone else," she explains, making a face at him and adding an extra spin to her toss.

"Well, there you have it, then. I would be the Finder of Lost Princess. I expect there's a good living in it," he answers. She's watching the pins, but she can hear the laugh he's not letting free.

He holds back a pin, and she almost fumbles, hand expecting a catch where there wasn't one. "Do you want to be a Princess, Helena?"

"Why would I want to be anything but what I am?" she answers, dropping a pin intentionally, replacing it deftly with a ball, the different shape trying to trick her hand into dropping it.

He manages. He's getting better. The shapes used to throw him. He was good when they began, but now, if she closes her eyes, she could be on a bridge in a place she'd drawn, and he could have a mask, deft hands, and a Tower that didn't speak to him. "Well. You wouldn't be, precisely, would you?"

"What does that mean?" She begins to circle again, the opposite way, feet crossing one another. As much a dance as a movement, if a slow and strange one.

"You already are a Princess, Helena. Your mum's the Queen, your dad's the King, and the audiences your subjects," Valentine explains, and he's moving too, but she's not watching him, because right now he's Valentine, and if she looks, he'll be Kevin, and she likes them both, but she misses Valentine like a heartbeat, sometimes, when she can't squint her eyes well enough to see that they're different and the same and that's not a bad thing.

"You're joining the show soon," she reminds him. "Does that make you royalty?"

"Do you want me to be?" he asks. Another pin drops, another ball in the air, bright and white. Helena catches and tosses and thinks of a white tower and a prone Queen and a million things that never really happened.

"Do you want me to want you to want to be?" she asks. It's nonsensical, and she knows it, but that's why it makes sense.

He laughs, feet landing back where he'd began, where she'd stood a moment ago. Another pin. It's balls now, entirely, flying tiny spheres of color. There's one black one there and Helena shuts her eyes, catching without watching for just a second. When she opens them again, she knows they're her eyes. Not ink-black. But sometimes, she wants things for herself and wants to be able to not care if it hurts anyone else, and thinks that if she does it, the ink would spread across pupils and irises and she'd be someone different and less.

He wouldn't like her with Black eyes. He likes her as she is. That's more important than maybe it ought to be, when she sometimes still likes him better with a mask.

"Are you nervous?" she asks, and her voice is quieter than she meant it to be, barely audible over the soft whiz of the flying balls.

He hears, and cocks his head, rhythm slowing, balls arching almost leisurely through the air between them, landing soft in her palm. "About what, Helena?"

"The show," she answers. She takes a step forward, and his brow furrows, his throws shorten. This is new, and he echoes the step hesitantly, distance between them starting to close.

"Why would I be?" he smiles cockily, and she rolls her eyes, takes another step closer. He amends after his feet echo the movement. "A little. I've had a good teacher, though."

"Everything will change afterward," Helena tells him, taking another step. She drops a ball, and he does the same, the few left pinging soft and simple between them.

"Change doesn't have to be bad," he answers, and the space between them is shrinking. "Any advice on what I should do?" A beat, a ball tossed, and then he adds, "For my first show."

She steps in, catches the last ball. Their hands still and she's looking up at him, smiling. "Don't let them see you're afraid," she tells him. And she knows she's doing it again, smiling when he doesn't know why, but her lips won't obey, curving up in a smile that's nervous and giddy and something softer and sweeter than she's familiar with. She thinks of looking through windows in a strange world to see her face pressed up against a boy she doesn't know, but dismisses it. That wasn't real. This is.

She leans up on tip-toe and presses her mouth to his. For a moment, she almost feels the hard edge of a square mask against her nose, but then it's just his nose. And the mouth against hers is Kevin's, and it's Valentine's, and that's fine. Because she can deal with them being both, but not quite either, so long as they're – he's – there. "Kevin," she murmurs against his mouth. It isn't a good kiss. She doesn't have much practice. He has more, and she can tell, but that's fine, too. She taught him to perform, after all. He can teach her something else.

He kisses her again, arms going around her back, the ball he still held tumbling down to the ground as his palm presses flat against her. When they break apart, he grins, and it's familiar enough that for a moment, the world around her warps into strange shapes, and a sphinx hovers on the edge of her vision like a mirage. "My first show will be in Paris. I know a bloke. He can get us into the Eiffel tower after hours. Bring a picnic. Celebrate my success."

Helena laughs. "So . . . you've your own tower, in a manner of speaking?"

He grins back, and he doesn't understand what's funny, but he doesn't seem to mind. Or maybe he's always understood. Maybe in another world and another time, they were different people. "I'm a very important man, Helena," he tells her gravely.

Helena smiles, tosses a ball in the air. "I believe you." And she did. He was important to her. In the end, that was all that mattered.   
~~


End file.
